Many engineers and contractors are facing increasing concern about comfort (residential) cooling units being misapplied to computer room applications. Prior to 2010 there was no required energy efficiency standard for computer room cooling equipment in the United States.
Today, federal regulations require computer room cooling equipment to meet a minimum Sensible Coefficient of Performance (SCOP) while similar municipal and state conservation codes are continuously evolving.

A logical starting place to discuss the grow process, and therefore the conditioning requirements, is with the mother plant in the mother room. To ensure consistency in the final product, the production plants are cloned from an existing mother plant. For this reason the health of the mother plants is critical to a successful grow operation. The mother room may have redundancy requirements for the HVAC equipment that the other grow rooms don’t.

I'm pleased to announce the availability of a new white paper that I have authored on the topic of environmental control of cannabis grow rooms. Since many engineering firms are being asked to design a grow facility for the first time, it is my hope that this white paper will provide a good basis for understanding the unique challenges of the cannabis industry and how they can be addressed with the right equipment.

For some time now, I have been working directly with some of the premier grow facilities in the United States, and this white paper outlines a great deal of what I have learned. I hope you find it informative.

Here is an excerpt from "Precision Environmental Controls for the Medical Cannabis Industry":

In our last post, we talked about the TC 9.9 thermal guidelines for data processing equipment and how they are providing an opportunity to use new, highly energy efficient technologies. In this post we will examine how we can achieve higher return air temperatures in your data center.

The enemy of high return air temperature is air mixing. So how do we prevent air mixing? There are several strategies that we will review but first, let’s talk a little bit about containment. At STULZ, we are staunch proponents of containment because we recognize that this allows our equipment to operate in its most efficient manner.

There have been some significant changes to the data center cooling industry in the last couple years. One of the most prominent changes has been the TC 9.9 Committee’s Thermal Guidelines for Data Processing Environments that was released in 2011.

These new guidelines expanded the operating envelope within the data center. Now upon first glance it may not look like these guidelines have changed significantly but they have actually expanded the allowed server entering air temperatures such that we can now safely use innovative technologies to achieve greater efficiency in the data center. This has led to some interesting new technologies being introduced to the white space such as indirect evaporative cooling and chiller assisted cooling systems.

Improving data center efficiency continues to be the foremost issue in the industry, whether you are designing a new mission critical facility or optimizing your existing one. Now that huge increases in efficiency have been achieved in the air conditioning sector in the recent years, another sector, the power supply and distribution from the grid to the chip, is becoming the focus of the industry. There is enormous potential for increased efficiency by reducing losses through conversion, transformation and distribution. The transition from AC power supply to 380 VDC offers several significant advantages.

I was recently re-reading an eBay case study published by EnergyStar in 2012 and it made me consider the progress that has been made in improving legacy data center energy efficiency in the intervening 3 years.It has been well documented that the USA has not only the largest number of existing data centers in the world, but also the oldest with many installations 10 years or older. Those legacy data centers are increasingly a factor in data center operations being responsible for such a large portion of our national energy consumption. Replacing old, inefficient technology that represents the single greatest opportunity to reduce waste (and therefore cost) within our industry.